CHAPEL HILL — After performing on stages across the world for a quarter of a century, the Jazz at Lincoln Center (JLC) Orchestra’s performance at Memorial Hall on Sunday night was as exquisite as anyone could expect.

Under the direction of legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the 15-member ensemble includes some of the finest jazz musicians of our time.

“We are celebrating our 25th anniversary,” Marsalis said to open up the show, “and we are going to do it with a minimum of talking and a lot of playing.”

And playing they did.

During the first hour of the show, the orchestra took the audience down memory lane with a delightful set of Duke Ellington’s compositions, including “The Mooche” and the classic “Mood Indigo.”

“Duke played it almost every night for almost 40 years after he composed it,” Marsalis said of the latter. “He loved playing it with good reason.”

In a more daring move, the ensemble performed “Braggin’ in Brass,” a tune Marsalis said Ellington only played once — when he recorded it in 1938 — probably because the trombone section was so difficult to play.

Trombonists Vincent Gardner, Chris Crenshaw and Elliot Mason were certainly up to the challenge as they delivered one of the best performances of the night.

“You’ll never see it played better than that,” Marsalis said as the audience cheered them on.

Before taking a short break, the orchestra closed its Ellington tribute by playing the four pieces that make up “Toot Suite,” which the composer wrote in the late 1950s: “Red Garter,” “Red Shoes,” “Red Carpet” and “Ready, Go!”

For the remainder of the show, the audience was mostly treated to original compositions by members of the orchestra and arrangements of Gerry Mulligan tunes, including an evocative rendition of “Lonesome Boulevard” by baritone saxophonist Paul Nedzela.

Crenshaw’s “The Creation,” inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s poem, “God’s Trombones,” served as a smooth transition into saxophonist Sherman Irby’s “Insatiable Hunger,” an upbeat piece inspired by Dante’s “Inferno” that could have easily served as theme for a spy movie and included a superb solo by drummer Ali Jackson.

Before an intimate encore by Marsalis and a few other of the musicians — Jackson, pianist Dan Nimmer, bassist Carlos Henriquez and saxophonist Walter Blanding Jr. — the audience marveled as the orchestra performed Garner’s arrangement of Kenny Dorham’s “Stage West,” a fast-paced tune that once again displayed the virtuosity of each member of the ensemble.

If the orchestra sounds this good at age 25, one can only expect greater things in years to come.

Keren Rivas is a former Times-News reporter who now works at Elon University.